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No More Secrets
=The Rant= Factories that produce physical items use robots that are guarded secrets. Eventually, the secret gets out, or the manufacturing process is replicated by the engineers of your competitors. More precisely, your competitors have the advantage of knowing the types of things you are using in house, and who you contracted with, and what their specialities are. Through espionage and poor security and secrets just being shared openly, the robotics that drive manufacturing have become very precise and efficient at what they do. Yet, they are still expensive, because the competition is the burgeoning population of China that is desperate for work in some way, so they can afford to live. The point there is that their competitors can do it at with a much lower overhead, and so the research and development that goes into robotics is expensive. The companies that choose to use 'humane' labor are forced to pay the research and development costs, themselves, because other companies choose to go with the 'cheaper' option, human labor. That ties in very nicely with my issue about non-competition. If the companies competed efficiently, the robotics would be cheaper, because all the major device manufacturers would be using robotics, instead of child labor. As much as I like the idea of employing people to provide them with a somewhat less miserable life, it doesn't change the fact that that person's life is miserable because all this lack of competition drives up the cost of innovation and drives down the cost of labor. I find it disgusting that anyone is employed anywhere where they do not make enough money in a month to buy the product they make hundreds of, every fucking week. Code that drives Facebook isn't what is valuable. It is the resources that Facebook has accumulated that is valuable. The talent (or lack thereof) that they employ. The servers they physically own. The data centers and other facilities they own. The engineers, the janitors, the receptionists, the CEO, the managers, every single goddamn employee. That, is what is valuable about Facebook. If they gave me their source-code tomorrow, I could hack it up, find flaws, fix them, add features, and release Facebook2 on a leased server in an Equinix data center. Assuming I can afford even that, of course. Data center costs are ridiculous. So, let's do it off my residential PoP. Great, now I have my desktop running a Linux VM with a LAMP stack and my instance of Facebook2. By the end of the week, I have 5 users. And Facebook has taken my "feedback" and added it to their product. Those fucker's stole my IP! So? There's no secrets involved in how coffee stirrers and vibrators are made. There are no 'secrets' involved with those products, yet people aren't springing up all over filling that stirrer with ergonomic grip market. I can look at a stirrer stick or a vibrator and think of ways to improve them. I can find out how they are made by looking at them and asking people experienced in the ways of making them. I wouldn't bet that the exact method of making a stirrer stick is known and not a secret, but I can't imagine people are holding onto that gem. If anything, I can imagine the person who invented the damn thing would love see your improvements. I almost said hear your ideas. And then it occurred to me, that's exactly it. An idea isn't a secret, and isn't useful. A prototype is what is useful. The code for Facebook isn't, on a whole, useful. To understand it, you need it, and the product, the prototype. You need the idea AND the prototype to demonstrate any real improvement on something. I can tell you until I am blue in the face all the ways I would improve Facebook, but you won't agree with me, until I show you a mock-up or a prototype working example. Glory goes to the first to release, not the first to invent. Not who has the idea first or the resources to implement the idea, the person or company who gets it to market first. Google+ very nearly challenged Facebook, but Facebook had the resource advantage. Google has millions of email users, but Facebook had the social networking users. Facebook turned an about-face, took the "feedback" that Google presented with their prototype, and implemented the suggestions. Within a week. That's the advantage of competition. If everyone in their garage is a risk to your standing again, then you have a reason to innovate, to make sure you stay on top. When did we lose sight of this? When did we say it was ok to call a foul because you didn't like the advantage the other team had, because the players were better? Who does this help? Bugs aren't found quickly. Features are slow to come out. Advancements are left on the drawing board until they offer a significant advantage. Keep competition low, and you can milk your customers for all their worth by trickling innovation out to them from the vault. If no one was permitted to improve on the car, we'd all be driving cars with wooden wheels. Or still telling stories around fires, because there's a market for cave drawings, and you don't want to get to speech too soon. MOVE ON. The next Age is around the corner, this one is almost over, it's time to celebrate. =TL;DR= The limited number of secrets that went into manufacturing your Prius are the reason that children are starving in Africa, children are making iPhones, we still use gasoline to drive our cars, and we still don't have flying cars. Thank you, sleep tight feeling green.